Good, Bad, and Ugly of the IOC Recommended English Names

An organization called the International Ornithological Congress (IOC) has been working since 1991 on the challenging task of creating a standard set of the English names of the birds of the world. Their assertion is that names based on logical rules and consensus should aid clear and crisp communication among global stakeholders such as birders, conservationists, publishers, and government officials. Such an improved system of standardized English names should consequently lead to success in ornithology and the conservation of birds worldwide.

THE GOOD
One welcome proposal is to normalize international nomenclature, eliminating multiple names for the same species. Thus, what we call the Eared Grebe in the Americas adopts the Eurasian appellation of Black-necked Grebe. Black-bellied Plover becomes Grey Plover (more on that ‘Grey’ in a moment), Dovekie becomes Little Auk, Bank Swallow becomes Sand Martin, Northern Shrike becomes Great Grey Shrike, and American Pipit becomes Buff-bellied Pipit. It’s not that these species are being assigned new names but rather that a single name is chosen from the multiple ones currently in use. Also note that the Old World tag doesn’t always win out, as Bewick’s Swan is collapsed into Tundra Swan. Apparently, this process also triggered some armchair speciation where a species like Kentish/Snowy Plover was split down the Old World-New World divide.

Kudos as well to the reconciliation of the great loon-diver debate. Henceforth, all good Gavia birds shall be known as loons, although Gavia immer seems to have gotten caught in the crossfire: on one side of the Atlantic, this beauty is called the Great Northern Diver while on the other side, it’s known as the Common Loon. I suppose it takes the wisdom of Solomon to contrive a name like Great Northern Loon.

Also positive is the standardization of hyphenation. Use of hyphens in compound group names is minimized, used only to connect two names that are birds or bird families like Eagle-Owl or when the name would be otherwise difficult to read. This may sound like grammatical minutiae but the elimination of extraneous punctuation is never a bad thing. Let Storm-Petrels be Storm Petrels, Night-Herons be Night Herons,and all that rot.

Finally, let’s applaud the elimination of extraneous descriptors in avian appellations. Sparrows, for example, are tough enough to ID as it is. Streamlining the erstwhile sharp-tailed set to simple Nelson’s and Saltmarsh Sparrow does a service to all of us.

THE BAD
If the aim of the proposed naming conventions is consistency, the task is far from complete. For example, why are buteos still separated by the Atlantic Ocean into buzzards and hawks? In the same vein, the unification of skuas and jaegers remains unfinished; Stercorarius pomarinus was pushed into the skua camp but parasiticus and longicaudus remain jaegers.

THE UGLY
You want ugly? How about renaming the noble Rough-legged Hawk as the Roughleg. Nomenclature like that may serve well in the field but such slang lacks the accuracy or aesthetic quality of its predecessor.

Also, it wasn’t that long ago that the Rock Dove was rechristened the Rock Pigeon. Now the IOC wants to dub our feral friend the Common Pigeon. Columba livia is nothing if not common, but the name change still seems obtrusive. My distaste similarly applies to Sturnus vulgaris, now called the Common Starling; I think the European descriptor serves as a perfect reminder of this invasive’s origins.

Still, the ugliest alteration is, at least to my American sensibilities, the choice to universally eschew ‘gray’ for ‘grey’ as favored by those who speak the Queen’s English. The adoption of a standard spelling makes logical sense but strikes me as surprisingly grating on an emotional level.

CONCLUSIONS
All in all, the recommendations of the International Ornithological Congress do a lot more good than bad in the effort to standardize English common names for birds. While I can see universal adoption of many of these recommendations as a positive step towards international understanding, it is clear that even by the IOC’s own standards, the task is not yet complete.

Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.

I don’t like the elimination of most hyphens. The example you used, the elimination of the hyphen between “night” and “heron” was to show that while night herons are herons, they are of a different type than, say, a Great Blue Heron. Ditto for screech-owls.

At least they used loon rather than the unimaginative and unhelpful “diver.” And the “grey” vs. “gray” doesn’t bother me at all…maybe I read too much Tolkein and Lewis as a child…

I would like to see more consistency in the use of hyphens when nouns are joined in a bird name – either all nouns hyphenated or all nouns not hyphenated. Of the two, I would prefer the latter. The current usage seems kind of random, and I am not sure the IOC version is much of an improvement.

The grey/gray division will probably remain for holarctic species in spite of IOC recommendations. I would not expect the AOU to deviate from American spelling on its own lists.

How much does having a single English name matter? Ornithologists and advanced birders refer to Latinized scientific names for serious writing or international communication. Current terminology is messy but the species under discussion is usually clear.

Good point about the spelling, Tai. It seems like Corey and Will find favour with your argument.

The rules governing hyphenation seem fairly consistent and rational. They eliminate hyphens in all but two cases:

1. Where both nouns are the names of birds or bird families a hyphen should be inserted to signify that the taxon belongs to the family of the second word, not the first like Hawk-Owl.

2. If a name is of a taxon that is not a member of the stated bird family, the letter after the hyphen should be lowercase to clarify that status. For example, a Silky-flycatcher is not technically a flycatcher.

Having standardized English names is generally a very nice idea and deserves full support.
However, each and every region has its own “indispensable” field guide, e.g. Sibley in North America, the SASOL guide in Southern Africa etc, a book everyone birding that area is using anyway.
And I think the names included in that guide will be used by the birders active in that region, be it as locals or as tourists from abroad, and then everybody involved in a conversation on birds will know which species the other one is talking about by using the names from that particular guide.
An example:
Using your Sibley guide in Spain might lead to misunderstandings regarding the Black Vulture, but then again, who’d be smart enough to take Sibley to Spain in the first place?

So all these standardized lists will be useless as long as people are using field guides that contain “the old” names. And it will take a while until new guides, which preferably will use the standardized names, will rule the market. How many of your field guides, for example, are using the new taxonomic order of bird families? Probably none. And that’s been established quite some years ago!

I would guess that “Roughleg” was chosen because it’s a “buzzard” on one side of the Atlantic and a “hawk” on the other. Calling it “Roughleg” means they didn’t have to choose. So whether a compromise is deemed wise (Great Northern Loon) or ugly (Roughleg), who can say? 🙂

I believe Common Pigeon was used to avoid confusion with an African species.

The “problem” of congeners with different English group names (e.g., hawks and buzzards in Buteo) is very common. Egrets and herons in Egretta is another example, and just think of the names of dabbling ducks in Anas — ducks, teal, pintails, shovelers, wigeons, gadwall, etc. I doubt these need to be standardized — after all, that’s what Latin names are for — unless there are multiple names for the same species within a genus (back to the “Roughleg” example above).

I think this list might succeed because it’s freely available online in many formats. No other world list based on a modern taxonomy is online right now. I’ve been calling for a free, online list of world birds for awhile, and that fact that one has finally arrived is really exciting.

My friend Fjord and I have been working with Frank Gill and his team to write software that processes the list into various formats. It is now available in CSV and XML formats in addition to the more human-friendly Excel and HTML formats.

I would imagine that, by virtue of its free availability, this list will be used increasingly in web projects and online communities. People no longer have to rely on illegal (or at least questionable) copies of H&M and Clements that circulate in certain circles, or on sites that can’t let you access the entire list all at once because of copyright issues.

I don’t like these names at all, to call divers “loons” is rediculous to the extreme. Favour seems to be going towards US names but I don’t agree with them at all, if you are travelling abroad, take the appropriate field guide, I always do and have never found it a problem. Latin names are there to stop confusion, that should be the only standardized naming system